Updates ISS UPDATES

[Soheil_Esy]

2015 Hugo Awards prize's winner announced by astronaut Kjell Lindgren in a live feed from the International Space Station

August 24, 2015

Hugo Award to open new chapter for Chinese sci-fi

Chinese writer Liu Cixin has become the first Asian author to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel, receiving the 2015 honor for his book, The Three-Body Problem.

The prize was announced by astronaut Kjell Lindgren in a live feed from the International Space Station Sunday.

“I’m of course very happy to win this award,” Liu told the Sina news website. “The Three-Body trilogy is my best work, but there are also places I wish I was able to revise. Since it has been published, I can’t.”

The Three-Body Problem is the first book in his sci-fi trilogy, which is about human responses to alien invasions. The books were originally serialized in a Chinese magazine between 2006 and 2010.

The author, winner of the Chinese Science Fiction Galaxy Award in 2006 and 2010, has sold more than a million copies of his trilogy in China.

A movie adaptation of The Three-Body Problem, which was also nominated for the 2014 Nebula Award for Best Novel, is now in production and expected to hit screens in July next year.

The English edition of the first novel was published last year, and the second book, Dark Forest, released this month. The final installment, Death’s End, is still being translated.

Ken Liu, the translator, received the Hugo Award at a ceremony in Spokane, Washington, on Saturday and he delivered a speech on behalf of the author. Few translated sci-fi novels enter the US market, let alone win the Hugo Award, he said.

Liu acknowledged the work of the translator in his interview with Sina. “We won the award together,” he said.

The 52-year-old, who used to work as a software engineer at a power plant in Shanxi province, has written 13 books. In April, he was appointed by IT giant Tencent as its mobilegames imagination architect.

Amazon, the e-commerce site, has included The Three-Body Problem in its list of “best books of 2015”, which is based on reviews.

Yao Haijun, deputy editor-in-chief of Science Fiction World, which serialized the award-winning novel, said on Sina Weibo that he believed Liu Cixin could repeat his Hugo Award success next year with Dark Forest.

“Today’s miracle might just be a start,” he wrote.

http://atimes.com/2015/08/hugo-award-to-open-new-chapter-for-chinese-sci-fi/

 

[Spacethingy]

[Ooops, 2010 video, sorry wrong thread!]

 

[Soheil_Esy]

ISS-observatory Cupola

Taken by Ralf Vandebergh on August 25, 2015 @ the Netherlands

Details:
The Cupola is clearly visible as a dark dot in the Tranquility node. Taken with 10 in Newtonian and AllCCD, @ F= 2880 mm , fully manuall aligned at crosshairs @ 6x magnification. Single frame selected on seeing and tracking quality.

http://spaceweathergallery.com/indi...d=116765&PHPSESSID=nna1kqee3cf6i4e5k1e603soj1

ISS Cupola With Closed Windows

Large JPG image
Taken by Ralf Vandebergh on August 26, 2015 @ the Netherlands

Camera Used: NIKON CORPORATION NIKON D3X
Exposure Time: 1/500
Aperture: f/8.0
ISO: 200
Date Taken: 2011:06:07 10:23:47

Details:
Ground-based shot compared with space-based. We see that the windows of the Cupola were probably closed at the time of the image.

http://spaceweathergallery.com/indi...d=116776&PHPSESSID=c1hh656le9u2i8bgl6898ktqo6

ISS Radiator Panels

Taken by Ralf Vandebergh on August 27, 2015 @ the Netherlands

Details:
We have good view on the S3 and S6 and the S1 and P1 almost edge-on. The ISS was in a deviant attitude as was intentionally performed because the Soyuz TMA-17M was arriving at the time of imaging. A rare chance to see the station in a different attitude from the ground.

http://spaceweathergallery.com/indi...d=116835&PHPSESSID=88omtt4dp75pagi8i08610jdo0

ISS Radiator Flare

Taken by Ralf Vandebergh on August 29, 2015 @ the Netherlands

Details:
When the ISS appears brighter then normally, probably this is happening: One of the big radiator panels in the mid of the station is flaring sunlight towards the observer. Such a radiator flare is visible in this image.

Taken with 10 inch Newtonian equatorial mount, tracked fully manually using 6x magnification and crosshair alignment. All CCD cam @ 2880 mm effective focal length.

http://spaceweathergallery.com/indi...d=116941&PHPSESSID=hub3l2fl91q5qcqjqc9huc9ri7

 

[Soheil_Esy]

SPACE STATION TRANSITS A PROMINENCE:

Wednesday, Sep. 2, 2015

In recent years, astrophotographers have become increasingly adept at catching the International Space Station during split-second transits of the sun. The winged form of the behemoth spaceship looks beautiful when backlit by fiery plasma, and on more than one occasion it has been seen in conjunction with active sunspots. Now, for perhaps the first time, Thierry Legault of Paris, France, has captured the silhouette of the ISS passing in front of a solar prominence:

"This was no accident," says Legault. "Using Calsky to predict the circumstances of the transit, I positioned my telescope 1 mile north of the central transit line so that the ISS would pass directly between me and the prominence."

His pinpoint preparations worked, and he captured more than 30 video frames of the ISS zooming across the face of the sun. The complete crossing may be seen on Youtube.

Solar observers are paying extra attention to prominences this week because that is almost the only thing to see. With only a few small sunspots dotting the solar disk, the face of the sun is nearly featureless. Plumes of plasma rising over the sun's limb are the photo-op du jure--even better when a spaceship joins the show.

http://spaceweather.com/

Large JPG image
Taken by Niki Giada on July 12, 2015 @ Urbino, Italy

Details:
Date Taken: 2015:07:14 01:31:05
My first ISS/Sun transit, manual shoting, with burst...a really near and fast transit .
Konuscope (in damn bad condition,dust,drunken collimation...) D200 f1200 + Nikon D610 + DIY Astrosolar filter.
All shots taken at 1/2000 sec 200 ISO.
The Sun is the sum of 25 shoots, i took only 2 shots of the ISS. I decide for manual shoting and not video due to major resolution of photo.With my sd i havent a good buffer, so i started shoting when i saw the ISS in the camera.
No motorization, all manual!
Lightroom (for camera raw regulation) + Registax (for stacking SUN and the ISS) + CS6 (for sharping,framing,text)
(After shoting i screamed like a cheerleader for 5min!YESSSS FINALLY GOT IT! :°D )

http://spaceweathergallery.com/indiv_upload.php?upload_id=115171

Large JPG image
Taken by Finotto Enrico on June 20, 2015 @ San Stino di Livenza, Venice

Camera Used: Canon Canon EOS 40D
Exposure Time: 1/8000
Aperture: f/inf
ISO: 800
Date Taken: 2015:06:20 16:11:46

Details:
Transit few weeks after the storm with friends Astronomica Treviso, Canon 40D, ISO 800, Vixen 102 FL

http://spaceweathergallery.com/indiv_upload.php?upload_id=113720

Large JPG image
Taken by Thierry Legault on August 21, 2015 @ Area of Paris, France

Details:
Date Taken: 2015:08:24 19:10:09
I made angles and positions calculations based on transit Calsky data and the real situation of the prominences, to install my telescope 1 mile north from the central transit line and have the ISS passing in front of a prominence.
On YT in real time:

Published on Sep 1, 2015

The International Space Station transits the Sun and a prominence on 2015 August 21st. Filmed from the area of Paris, France, with Takahashi FSQ-106, Coronado SM90 DS, Basler acA1920-155um.
Thierry Legault - www.astrophoto.fr

http://spaceweathergallery.com/indiv_upload.php?upload_id=117032

 

[Soheil_Esy]

The next more ethical, less barbaric (to some posters above: never overlook these billions of so more advanced exocivilizations that are surrounding us), more efficient but much more difficult step: turning human poop into astronaut meals :thumbup:




Janicki Omniprocessor - YouTube

This is how the Russians resupply the ISS with water. A transparent bag filled with water and contained in a tank is transferred from the Progress ship to the ISS.

Here is a dinner in the ISS.

When there are nine people aboard the International Space Station, it's a bit of a full house. It's been a solid, busy week since Andy, Sergei and Aidyn joined the rest of us. It's not every day you get to work with such a unique crew comprised of good people from five different countries: Russia, USA, Denmark, Japan and Kazakhstan.

At the end of the day, the dinner table acts as a unifier, a place of community. Sharing a meal gives us a chance to put aside work and catch up with one another. While nutrition is important to us physically - maintaining our health and mitigating the negative effects of microgravity on our bodies - mealtime also is important to us psychologically.

Dining together can radically shift perspectives, blurring boundaries just as looking down on Earth from our vantage point, especially, when dinner partners are from all different corners of the world. But also mealtime lets us build a sense of camaraderie.

Andy, Aidyn and Gennady - whom I launched to the International Space Station with nearly six months ago - will begin their journey home today. I will miss those guys. They are good friends to break bread with.

Eat simply, and eat together.

A New Efficient Filter Helps Astronauts Drink Their Own Urine


Recycling water is key to getting humans to Mars

September 11, 2015

Making sure that astronauts have enough to drink is one of the toughests parts to figuring out long-term space travel. Water is heavy, quickly used and expensive to get into orbit. To put it into perspective, it costs $10,000 per pound to launch a spaceship, and a gallon of water weighs 8.33 pounds.

Astronauts are limited to three gallons a day when they're in space, but that still adds up. $249,900 each day! As NASA sets it sights on Mars, astronauts will need an efficient way to recycle water.

Astronauts have been drinking distilled urine since 2009, and they currently recapture 93 percent of wastewater, but the system they’re using now is heavy, slow and has been prone to breaking down. It spins the urine at high speed to separate out the water vapor, then treats it chemically. The system can recycle 6,000 liters a year, but that's not enough to sustain a crew of multiple astronauts over a long period.

So astronauts on the International Space Station are testing a new way to drink filtered pee. Aquaporin A/S, a Danish biotech company, has developed a filter that uses aquaporin proteins to pull clean water out of urine, sweat, wastewater, condensation and other liquid sources available in space. Aquaporin molecules are proteins that live within cell membranes that are super efficient at letting water pass through, but don’t transfer anything else.

“There are many types of aquaporins, some can do the selective water transport better than others, but in essence this is what makes our membrane technology unique. We use these proteins as building blocks in the fabrication of the membranes,” says Claus Hélix Nielsen, Aquaporin’s vice president for public-private partnerships.

The filter works essentially the same way your kidney does. The system is just two tubes hooked up to an energy source. It pulls a liter of urine from one container through the filter and out into another container in less than a minute. The device is small, light and less likely to clog than the filters currently being used.

Aquaporin A/S has been working with NASA since 2011, testing prototypes in a lab. “So far, the Aquaporin Inside Forward Osmosis membrane is the only membrane we have tested that comes very close to fulfilling the membrane requirements for a simple, lightweight and reliable system to extract potable water from body fluids in space,” Michael Flynn, head of the advanced human support technology research group at NASA Ames, said in a press release.

As of last week, European Space Agency astronaut Andreas Mogensen is at the International Space Station testing the filters. Mogensen will be filtering three urine samples while he’s in space. He’s also bringing the filtered water back to Earth to be analyzed here. If the system works well, Aquaporin A/S would like to bring the device to other places where clean water is hard to come by—whether that be developing countries or drought-ridden areas.

“The main importance lies in our ambition to deliver low-energy solutions for water treatment,” Hélix-Nielsen says.

The Aquaporin filter is simple and light.


http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innov...nauts-drink-their-own-urine-180956499/?no-ist

Image of a double ISS satellite transit

2015 September 12

Explanation: Not once, but twice the International Space Station transits the Sun on consecutive orbits of planet Earth in this video frame composite. The scene was captured on August 22 from a single well-chosen location in Schmalenbeck, Germany where the ISS created intersecting shadow paths only around 7 kilometers wide. Crossing the solar disk in a second or less, the transits themselves were separated in time by about 90 minutes, corresponding to the space station's orbital period. While the large, flare-producing sunspot group below center, AR 2043, remained a comfortable 150 million kilometers away, the distance between camera and orbiting station was 656 kilometers for its first (upper) transit and 915 kilometers for the second more central transit. In sharp silhouette the ISS is noticeably larger in angular size during the closer, first pass. Of course, tomorrow the Moon will transit the Sun. But even at well-chosen locations, its dark, central shadow just misses the Earth's surface creating a partial solar eclipse.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150912.html

 

[Cosmic Penguin]

A new EVA with Scott Kelly and Kjell Lindgren is currently underway outside the ISS. Here's a full walk through of what to do today: http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/10/astronauts-housekeeping-eva-32-outside-iss/

 

[Cosmic Penguin]

....and another EVA is underway outside the ISS right now! This one mainly aims to restore the original configuration of the P6 truss thermal control system after it was altered during attempts to stop an ammonia leak there back in late 2012 - early 2013: http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/11/astronauts-spacewalk-reconfigure-solar-array-cooling-system/

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9Ojp4B-iys"]3D Animation of Nov. 6 Spacewalk Activities - YouTube[/ame]

 

[Soheil_Esy]

ISS captures a Geminid Meteor as it entered the Earth's green air glow layer

Large JPG image
Taken by Frankie Lucena on December 12, 2015 @ Cabo Rojo,Puerto Rico

Camera Used: NIKON CORPORATION NIKON D4
Exposure Time: 1/1
Aperture: f/1.4
ISO: 10000
Date Taken: 2015:12:16 21:11:48

Details:

I was going through their most recent photos and noticed a meteor in the horizon. When I zoomed in I realized that they had photographed it just as it entered our green air glow layer. You can view the original photo here:

Large JPG image
http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/SearchPhotos/photo.pl?mission=ISS046&roll=E&frame=807

http://spaceweathergallery.com/indi...d=120886&PHPSESSID=vis49r77kf5j7fdukn52junnv6

 

[IronRain]

From Twitter (our own Orbinaut Pete):

BREAKING: A spacewalk is to occur on the #ISS early next week as the Mobile Transporter (MT) outside the ISS has become stuck.

Cause of the stuck MT is suspected to be the Starboard CETA (Crew Equipment Translation Aid) cart's brake being engaged.

EVA crew will be Scott Kelly (@StationCDRKelly) and Tim Kopra (@astro_tim). Tim Peake (@astro_timpeake) likely to assist from inside.

 

[Cosmic Penguin]

From Twitter (our own Orbinaut Pete):

The EVA will occur later today from 13:10 UTC onwards and will last around 3.5 hours. Here's what the astronauts will do to get free of the stuck brakes and secure the cart: http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/12/nasa-eva-free-stuck-ceta-cart-iss/

 

[Soheil_Esy]

The International Space Station passing in front of the moon

Pyrzowice, Poland

2015-12-20, 17:08 CET

Celestron C9.25, f = 2350 mm

ZWO ASI174MM

ZWO R filter

Exposure time 378 μs, 116 FPS (video is 30 FPS, about 4x slower than real time)

ISS distance = 643 km, ISS angular size = 43.0″

Raw footage, no processing.

One of the best frames:

Together with a Moon mosaic recorded about 1 hour later:

Higher quality version:

Edit: Real time version: http://gfycat.com/VainLiveAtlanticbluetang - that's how fast it moves across the sky.

More of my astrophotography stuff: http://bartoszwojczynski.com

https://www.reddit.com/r/astrophoto...wo_largest_satellites_of_our_planet_captured/

 

[Soheil_Esy]

Mold Attacks Space Station Plants

Jan 7, 2016

Four zinnia plants on the International Space Station are sickly or dead after mold was discovered in the Veggie experiment facility late December, according to NASA. The problem was immediately traced back to excessive water in the experiment, which was addressed. There are still three healthy plants that appear unaffected by the issue.

ISS commander and NASA astronaut Scott Kelly reported the mold to Mission Control Dec. 22 just as Veggie project manager Trent Smith was trying to manage the water problem. In pictures, Smith saw water on the plants a few days before. He told Discovery News he was trying to relay a command from NASA’s station operations team to increase fan speed in Veggie, but the mold developed before the command could be put through.

http://news.discovery.com/space/space-fungus-mold-found-on-space-station-plants-160107.htm

 

[boogabooga]

Regarding the mold:

Better to find out now than have the Mars colony's food supply wiped out.
Just one more thing to make space travel dangerous.

 

[Soheil_Esy]

Color ISS Capture

http://0e33611cb8e6da737d5c-e13b5a9...00_b0g100v539_CB100_0_GA100_1452415067_lg.jpg
Taken by Sylvain Weiller on January 10, 2016 @ SAINT-RÉMY-LES-CHEVREUSE


Details:

This was my first trial at color ISS capture with a new and very sensitive color camera. In the future it should give much better results !
Yesterday evening was rainy and chances of clear sky during the pass where doubtful then I finally woke up 40 min before the pass was at 08:02 AM. It was not very bright (Mag -2.9). With little time remaining I did not install the normal tracking system. Instead I only setup the C8 & the color ASI 224MC camera. I did leap tracking with the Telrad.
I got some tens of frames ... the image shown is the registering of 8 successive frames.
The orange solar panels are nice !
More infos and movie @ http://sweiller.free.fr/


http://spaceweathergallery.com/indi...d=121707&PHPSESSID=vmnq41fvh8qd0vj60e231kvuh5

 

[Cosmic Penguin]

In other news, there's another spacewalk later today for replacing a power supply unit on the truss (SSU) that failed last month. As Tim Peake is one of the two "Tims" who will go out today, this will make the first ever spacewalk by a British! :thumbup:

 

[Urwumpe]

EVA has started, outer hatch is open and space suits on internal power.

 

[DaveS]

EVA has started, outer hatch is open and space suits on internal power.

And the EVA was terminated early at around 1700UTC due to the presence of water inside EV1's (Tim Kopra) EMU helmet, similar to what happened to Exp. 36 FE Luca Parmitano on US EVA 23 on July 16 2013. This time however the water build-up inside the helmet was smaller. Interesting note is that both incidents involve the same EMU, serial number 3011.

 

[Urwumpe]

And the EVA was terminated early at around 1700UTC due to the presence of water inside EV1's (Tim Kopra) EMU helmet, similar to what happened to Exp. 36 FE Luca Parmitano on US EVA 23 on July 16 2013. This time however the water build-up inside the helmet was smaller. Interesting note is that both incidents involve the same EMU, serial number 3011.

I would say, its a lemon.

 

[RGClark]

Mission aborted! British astronaut Tim Peake and Nasa's Tim Kopra ordered back to ISS early after American astronaut's helmet starts filling up with WATER
Tim Peake and Tim Kopra embarked on their spacewalk 1pm GMT, which was streamed live by Esa and Nasa
The pair successfully replaced a power unit on the furthest point of the ISS, 200 feet (61 metres) from the airlock
But the ,ission was aborted two thirds of the way through when Tim Kopra's helmet began to fill with water
Major Peake has made history as the first Briton to conduct a spacewalk and said he felt 'exhilarated'
His wife Rebecca thanked him via Twitter for taking a photograph of his sons into 'the vacuum of space'
By SARAH GRIFFITHS and RICHARD GRAY FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 04:05 EST, 15 January 2016 | UPDATED: 15:44 EST, 15 January 2016
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...k-repair-faulty-power-unit-space-station.html

Bob Clark

 

[MaverickSawyer]

I would say, its a lemon.

Well, since we once again have the ability to return stuff to Earth, I think they should end up a new suit aboard the next Dragon and bring the faulty unit back down for a complete factory-level teardown and analysis to find out what's wrong. Once they fix it, it's kept available as a replacement unit that can be sent back up later.